“The principle goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - men who are creative, inventive and discoverers.”
Really?
Jean Piaget’s revolutionary Goal of Education is as alien to many learning pros as craters on the lunar surface. Oh sure, we see those craters up there on a clear night, but they have nothing to do with most of us, really. You and me, we’re mostly about training people to do what others have done already, are we not?
I’ll go farther and posit that instructional designers and teachers - despite avowals to the contrary - can be among the most inflexible, hackneyed and stilted professionals in the world of work. We’re charged with equipping the mind and spirit for a noble quest. Instead we take off points for punctuation.
However there are sublime exceptions. The Harvard Business School is one such: an academy of thought leaders and game changers, a bulwark against rote learning and compliant role playing, a feeder for the best corporations and institutions in the United States.
Yet now, as we sink into the detritus of irrational exuberance, maybe it’s time to ask: what hath the Harvard Business School wrought?
Ethicist Charles Green addresses the question in a recent issue of BusinessWeek. Avaricious investors and Wall Street replicants are not the cause of current economic turmoil. “Harvard Business School is to blame,” he says, because it fostered the two most destructive forces of the modern financial world: “a view of strategy as competition (think sustainable competitive advantage) and a view of business as optimizing systems (think business process re-engineering and outsourcing).”
Whoa, hold on a second! If the goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, then Harvard MBAs surely prove the efficacy of learning at the top of our pedagogical food chain. Green admits that newly minted Crimson MBAs are doing something that hasn’t been done before (turning the whole world into their personal oysters).
Only he doesn’t like it.
Why not? Because he believes that the consequences and not just the transformations of education are the responsibility of people who teach.
So then, shall we blame our learning programs for what they produce? Shall professors be responsible for what their students do when class is over and “real life” resumes?
The question is interesting for educators and trainers who try to justify their existence through measures of return on investment in “human capital” (a term which Green despises as gravely pejorative). If the learning profession is going to claim credit for making a positive difference to business, then it also better accept blame for unleashing destructive forces.
If I train people to do bad things, I must own it. If I teach somebody how to steal from an employer, I am a thief. If I train somebody how to kill a patient, I am a murderer. If I teach somebody how to destroy an entire financial system as a by-product of self-aggrandizement, I am a fraud.
I am what my students or trainees become with my ideas. The ivory tower and the corporate university offer no sanctuary (as the recipients of forced furloughs now appreciate more than ever).
Charles Green writes that Harvard can correct course by teaching “less competitive differentiation and more collaborative value-adding; less how to win supply chain negotiations and more how everyone gains by operating as collaborators; less about transactions, more about relationships; less about winning individually, and more about jointly succeeding.”
In other words, Green wants Harvard and the rest of us to blend ethics into everything we do, and not reserve it for community outreach or the charitable foundations we create with our unfathomable wealth.
His concepts are bold, and they can easily trickle down to the basic knowledge and skills training that most of us design. But if we accept his challenge, we may need to augment Piaget’s dictum:
The principle goal of education is to create people who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done - people who are creative, inventive and discoverers of the truth and the best that is possible in our world.
I’ll go with that.
Charles H. Green is the founder of TrustedAdvisor Associates and a co-author of "The Trusted Advisor." He is a 1976 graduate of Harvard Business School.
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